Why Do I Listen To Records?
This last Saturday was a rather rough day. Roofing
contractors were working in my neighborhood, got the wrong address, and
mistakenly began tearing the roof off my house. I awoke at 7:25 am to people
ripping holes right above my bedroom. It was only a 4 year old roof. Now, they
have since come back, and done a marvelous job repairing their damages, but let
me tell you, it made for a stressful day.
To comfort me, a couple groups of good friends came by with
two of my favorite things, craft beer and records to play. Since my blog isn’t
about craft beer (though I could I go on and on about how I love that, too),
I’m going to stick to why I love these wonderful round discs of music.
Is it the sound quality? It’s true, the fidelity is often
times much better than that of a CD, and is always far superior to that of an mp3 or streaming audio. Even through some
clicks and pops, surface noise, and some occasional static, it’s still a better
sonic experience. But, am I sitting there each time, marveling at how
incredible each record sounds? Well, sometimes, but not usually. There are a
few times where I just can’t help but be pulled in by the sheer quality of the
experience, but not that often. My Pro-Ject One turntable, with its Oyster cartridge
has certainly spoiled me, even for being a somewhat entry-level table.
So, is it the novelty? That seems to be what has drawn so
many people to vinyl. For me, unequivocally not. Records have been with me
since day one, and have never been some kitschy thing I picked up to impress my
friends. I’ve never bought a little Crosley tabletop record player, nor would
I, but have always had a quality turntable.
Is it nostalgia? That would suggest that I’m stuck in a
bygone era. Hardly. I still buy newer releases on vinyl, as well as older
records, too. It’s certainly not that. I have both newer and vintage turntables
in similarly newer and vintage systems. I can relive the past, should I choose,
but my technology is also decidedly modern.
So what exactly is it then?
I’ve come to realize that it is truly the tactile feel of playing a record that
keeps me doing it. Part of the reason that we, as audiophiles, invest so much
into our systems is for the realism of the music. We want to get as close to
the live or studio experience as possible. Having that platter in front of me,
turning at a comforting 33-and-a-third RPM also keeps the music in the same
room as me. A CD slips into a drawer and disappears, spinning at hundreds of
revolutions per minute. Streaming audio comes from the cloud. That’s just
voodoo. Vinyl is there with me, in the room, bringing me the music, in person-
so to speak. Its flaws- pops, clicks, even the skips, etc.- only serve to
remind me how much more human the experience really is, and that keeps bringing
it home even more. The added fidelity, the lack of digital jitter, the analog
warmth, are all just added bonuses to enhance the experience and make it what
it is.
What we begin to pour into it, in things like high-end
cables, isolating pads, cork mats, and all the other accoutrements that go into
making this an expensive hobby (people are shocked when I tell them you can
spend over $100,000 on a turntable) just make it our own personal journey with the
turntable.
If the CD is truly dead, which I don’t believe that it is,
its demise can only be blamed on its lack of humanism that vinyl has always
had. I think that people are beginning to reconnect with the human aspect to
records in the same way that I always have because of the inhuman nature of the
download. Music, even in the recorded sense, has always been something we have
been meant to connect with; as we have lost that in recent years, it has only
been natural for there to be some sort of clamoring for a tactile reconnection
with it.
The ebb-and-flow of our relationship with media formats
through the years has led us back to vinyl, and the album itself as a real
thing. People need something to hold. That feeling never really left me. I’ve
always needed that album cover to look at. The artwork of an album cover used
to carry such heavy weight, and with the advent of the 5” CD, began to lose
some of that workspace and artistic expression. Once people began downloading
music, suddenly, there was no album cover. Where was the art? I think we know that
the art will always prevail somehow, and album covers are showing up on new
vinyl, CDs, and the screens of media servers. However, there’s still the inner
sleeve, poster, gatefold, and any other surprise one might find inside that
beautiful record.
And that for me, is why they’ll never go out of style.
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